I am not sure how you ethically kill someone who doesn’t want to die.

On principle I don’t object to scavenging, I find it repulsive but just like how if you ate your parents when they died nobody would be hurt per se collecting road kill or something is not unusually cruel. Just creepy and gross given the lack of necessity.

How do you feel about “this animal has to be culled for the good of the ecosystem, and incidentally makes good eating”?

Where I live, Australia, we have the issue that kangaroos have few predators (dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles have to attack in groups to even bring down one (plus both are rare nowadays and prefer to poach farm animals now anyway) and the predators who could have soloed a kangaroo, like thylacoleo, megalania, and quinkana, are all 40000 years extinct, give or take), but they still breed like animals expecting to meet their end to some manner of predator. So in place of the predators that would usually keep their numbers down, hunting quotas are used to keep their numbers at an appropriate level. And as a side effect of this, a large amount of kangaroo meat enters the market, because they’re not exactly small animals and they’re perfectly edible.

We also have issues with feral pigs, rabbits, cats, camels and horses (among other animals, most of which are either too small to eat and/or have horrible fucking toxins in their flesh) that should not be here at all, given the horrific amount of damage they do to the native ecosystem on account of evolving in a far more competitive environment. The end goal is that they all fucking die, so it’s not a totally sustainable business to hunt them for meat, plus the pigs and rabbits are disease-ridden (some of which we gave them in order to achieve the objective of total eradication) and the public has issues with eating cat meat, but we could totally do the same with the camels and horses, at least until the feral populations cease existing.

Okay, source I used was a little out of date (was looking at 2015 numbers, oops), but even the 2022 numbers disagree somewhat. OECD claims 77, CIA claims 78.

That’s very interesting, thank you

Maths understander here, in 2042 they’ll be 60, not 62. Also the average life expectancy in the US is 79 years, i.e. enough of a difference compared to 60 that you could fit (and live to see) a grandkid/great-grandkid’s entire childhood in there.

Although that 79 years figure is Life Expectancy at Birth, in practice it tends to be longer for most surviving adults older than a certain point, mostly because the lower ranges of the chart hit their allotted moment and pass on for whatever reason, leaving the remaining average higher still

Of course, with calculus living rent free in my head rn thanks to the uni course of the same name, I’m wondering what that chart of “current age vs expected remaining age” looks like, and where the point of “ageing faster than your remaining likely time grows” lies

Too much evidence for that, thanks to how many almost complete t. rex skeletons we have + the fact that almost all giant carnivorous dinosaurs had tiny arms. However, there’s a non-zero chance they were fluffy in at least some places, and a high chance they were incredibly fluffy as chicks, given how fluffy one of their close relatives is known to be.

Also they weren’t even the most extreme example of tiny arms

1. not all of us live in countries that have any political influence over Israel, only the US holds their leash, and protesting anywhere else can’t really affect that clusterfuck

2. plenty of awful shit is still going on around the world that needs to be fought, and that doesn’t change just because a worse thing is going on in a very specific part of the world. Climate change, for example, is still happening, still an existential threat to all of humanity, and still needs public protesting to do something about.

Which, living in a country that can’t help Palestine in any diplomatic way, gets a bit annoying when people are regularly protesting about that (and before that, the invasion of Ukraine), while a huge percentage of our country’s electricity still comes from burning fucking coal, we still export large amount of it to the global market, our CO2 emissions per capita manage to be some of the highest in the world, and protests about that could actually do some tangible good, but are a blip in the ocean compared to foreign wars of late. I get the anger at the injustices going on right now, but it’s not anger that can get anything done here

Your inner dog tells you that you have contracted the PathOwOgen and will soon be a furry

I mean, even assuming that business degrees aren’t a waste of money and time, learning things you would pick up working in the corporate world anyway, while not learning any creative or practical skills…

Humanities still make better general-purpose degrees because they actually teach you things like critical thinking, questioning your sources and their biases, self-examination, etc. Things that society needs now more than ever. From my experience of friends with philosophy degrees, the world would be a vastly better place if even 1 in 20 people had one.

brb, going to grab a minor in philosophy so I can make fun of them for being ultimately useless to greater humanity and incapable of morality, ethics or self-reflection

(every business major I know easily fulfills both criteria)

I will dry everything on the line, and there is neither weather nor HOAs that can stop me

Speaking as an Australian:

I also feel like you need mandatory voting (with enforcement), like what we have. That reframes elections from “riling up your power base so they go out and vote” to “hey average voter, here’s why you should vote for me and how things will improve if you do so”.

A friend I know who has a philosophy degree got visibly angry when she saw this, because she hates it when complex philosophical/political quandaries are “solved” with a paragraph, especially since all of said paragraph-long solutions start breaking down the second you start thinking about them.

Every time you repost this meme, a philosopher weeps

Until the fetus can survive outside the womb, it’s not a person, it’s a part of the person carrying it. And nobody should be allowed to dictate what a person can and can’t do to themself, but themselves.

Total Bodily Autonomy, motherfucker.

Even if you miss, the shockwaves the bullet makes will kill every fish in the barrel anyway. The Mythbusters tested it.

Lethal shockwaves go brrr, actually

Consider the following, though:

Advertising is a huge fucking scam, and only worth about 1-5% of the money it generates

Trans? Tick

Programmer? Tick

Furry? That depends on your definition, does wanting to be a giant snake from the waist down but basically human with some cosmetic additions above the waist make me a furry? (or more specifically a scaly?)

Apparently eggs have already been done, as has milk that can be turned into cheese

Although it’s a different process

Rather than grow them by duplicating existing cells, instead you GMO brewer’s yeast to produce the proteins you want, similar to how we make insulin now, and then add the few things you can’t get the yeast to provide (which with sufficient tinkering, is basically just the shell, and even that can be substituted with plastic containers)

Either way you as a country still need something better than First Past The Post voting, which absolutely centralises power in to just two parties and makes a 3rd party impossible.

Mixed Member Proportional looks pretty good, where half of all seats are tied to local electorates and won by the votes in them, while the other half are given out to parties based on what’s needed to make the assembly match the overall voting of the country, e.g. if your party gets 50% of the popular vote but only wins 25% of location-based seats, you’re given enough unassigned seats to make it so that you control 50% of seats in the assembly.

Too bad one party has no interest in making it the system you use, and the other would actively fight it because it would kill them as a political force forever